NBN cus­tomers get­ting speed­ier

AUS­TRALIANS switch­ing to the heav­ily crit­i­cised Na­tional Broad­band Net­work are now more than twice as likely to be on a 50Mbps speed plan or higher than in 2017.

How­ever, new in­ter­nal data re­leased to­day shows low speeds are still the most pop­u­lar.

The stats re­veal that the num­ber of Aus­tralian homes and busi­nesses con­nected to higher speed plans over the NBN broad­band ac­cess net­work has more than dou­bled — and more than one mil­lion peo­ple have up­graded their in­ter­net speeds in the last four months.

One of the prob­lems with the roll out of the net­work has been that 85 per cent of Aus­tralians have been choos­ing cheap low-speed tiers of 25Mbps or 12Mbps, but ag­gres­sive dis­counts on the prices charged by the NBN Co as the whole­saler has moved this up to 64 per cent.

The promis­ing sta­tis­tics come af­ter the com­pany build­ing Aus­tralia’s broad­band net­work an­nounced last week it would do what many have been call­ing for — it would in­crease the num­ber of FTTC, or fi­bre-to-the-curb, con­nec­tions in the roll­out.

The FTTC con­nec­tions (pre­vi­ously called fi­bre-to-the-dis­tri­bu­tion point) run fi­bre closer to the home and there­fore uses less old cop­per wiring to make the fi­nal con­nec­tion.